This Didn’t Start With Breathwork

I used to think my breathwork story began deep in motherhood, somewhere between exhaustion, overwhelm, and the quiet knowing that something had to change. But when I really sit with it, I can see now that this work began much earlier. It began with a little girl who learned how to hold things that weren’t hers to hold.

I learned early how to read a room. How to sense what others needed. How to stay pleasant, capable, and easy.

There was a kind of emotional awareness in my childhood that came too soon. Knowing things I didn’t yet have language for. Feeling the weight of other people’s emotions and quietly adapting around them. Somewhere along the way, I learned that my role was to cope,

to carry on, and to keep things moving.

As an adult, I became very good at “getting on with it”. I showed up smiling. I pushed myself. I believed that if I just did more, learned more, achieved more, and proved myself, I might finally feel settled inside.

I left school without many qualifications and carried a lot of quiet shame about that. In my early twenties, I pushed hard. I went back into education, then further, then all the way to university. From the outside, it looked like growth and success. Inside, I was still anxious, still overwhelmed, still not at home within myself.

I craved connection, but I didn’t feel secure within myself, so relationships often felt messy or unsteady. I could be self-destructive at times, not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t yet know how to care for myself in a way that felt safe.

In my late twenties, I started therapy. Around the same time, I met my husband, and for a while life felt steadier. Then I became a mother. With motherhood came love, depth, and meaning, and also that familiar feeling of drowning.

I coped how I always had. I held it together.

But when I was pregnant with my second baby, something in me knew I couldn’t do this the same way again.

My first real introduction to breathwork came through hypnobirthing.

That birth changed everything.

I felt present. Powerful. Deeply connected to my body in a way I never had before. For the first time, I trusted myself. Not because I had learned the right thing, but because I could feel what was happening in my body and respond to it.

That experience reshaped my outlook on birth, on my work, and on myself. Then lockdown arrived. I had my third baby. Life became loud, busy, and uncertain. A house full of children. A nervous system stretched thin.

This time, I came back to the breath on my own.

I was breathing quietly in the bathroom. Watching YouTube videos. Taking moments wherever I could find them. There was nothing dramatic or performative about it. No big breakthrough moment.

But something was happening.

I started to feel steadier. Lighter. Life felt more spacious and more manageable. Eventually, I was able to come off anti-anxiety medication, not because I was “fixed”, but because I finally had a way to meet my body where it was.

That’s when I really fell in love with breathwork.

Not as a technique. Not as a transformation story.

But because it met me exactly where I was. It didn’t ask me to perform. It didn’t ask me to fix myself.

It simply helped me feel better in my body.

Three years on, breathwork sits at the core of everything I do, in my work with clients, in my parenting, and in how I regulate myself day to day.

And with that comes responsibility.

Over the past year, I’ve felt a quiet but persistent call to deepen my understanding of this work. Not because I don’t feel good enough, but because I care deeply about holding people safely, ethically, and with real care.

This doesn’t feel like starting again. It feels like continuing. Like deepening.

A natural unfolding of the work I’m already doing, and the woman I’m already becoming.